For January: I Am Still Here

January 2012. Strange month. I have been quiet on this blog. But I am still here. I never really left. I said a lot elsewhere but people were looking for me in the same places where my sometimes discordant, often cantankerous rant fills the marketplace. It is just that January 2012 was a strange month. There was the removal of the fuel subsidy on (New Year’s Day, no less) by President Goodluck Jonathan, the president of our Nigeria. As we all now know, #OccupyNigeria was immediately born and it proceeded to occupy our consciousness. That was some conflagration, albeit brief. It was as if Nigerians had finally woken up to the monumental fraud that passes for democracy in Nigeria. And man, they fought back ferociously. It is fair to say that despite the outcome, Nigeria will not be the same again ever after the Harmattan that was Operation #OccupyNigeria.

The days of January were incredibly exciting and frightening. The role of the Internet and the social media in fueling and organizing the rage on the ground was fascinating. News and information travelled all over the world at lightning speed, gunned by the multiplier effect of dissemination on Facebook and Twitter. Nigeria’s leaders looked like obese sheep caught in the headlights of an oncoming train wreck. This has to be the most incompetent and corrupt regime ever in the history of Nigeria. In retrospect, it makes sense now that brute force was the only tool that this government had to crush the uprising.

In the mayhem, something magical happened. A new word came upon the scene and this time people felt it – accountability. All it took to get the attention of powerful ministers in Nigeria was one hundred and forty characters on twitter. It was amazing. Many Nigerians found themselves tweeting multiple times per hour as information filtered in through what seemed to be infinite sources. For once, a few words on Twitter could get Aso Rock’s beleaguered spokesman Reuben Abati to reach for his decrepit tools of damage control. He was no match for e-journalists like Omoyele Sowore (Sahara Reporters) and the warriors of Twitter and Facebook. Nothing was more hilarious than watching President Jonathan read a speech that we had already read on Sahara Reporters (I swear everybody in Aso Rock secretly works for Sahara Reporters – including the president!). We saw many Nigerian writers of note and stature mixing it up with their readers on Twitter and Facebook and supporting the struggle with the force of their words. In this fight, we learned that there are new and infinitely rewarding ways of connecting with each other.

There was a dark side to this new empowerment. The power of free expression and random access organization was also a double-edged sword as it soon became clear that the filtering and quality control mechanisms of traditional (read analog) communications tools were missing. It did not seem to matter; disenfranchised Nigerian youths found a liberating outlet for their angst and frustration against a regime of thugs and thieves that had united to deny them basic rights like a decent education, and a future to look forward to. And as I look in the e-eyes of all my friends on Twitter and Facebook, I get the sense that this struggle continues – in the name of all the blood of our young people that was spilled by the thugs of Aso Rock.

New leaders are born every day and many of them are avatars we will never feel or see. Let me just say that even the help in Aso Rock know the name Tolu Ogunlesi. Every re-tweet of his to his thousands of followers ensured that #OccupyNigeria activists were not going to retreat an inch from their position. Today, the word is even more powerful and dangerous that it ever has been in the history of the world. And the writer has a moral obligation to weigh the impact of his or her words on the world. As we saw in January, words can now spread like wild e-fire and send chills down the spines of even the worst dictators – or pour ice water on the raging fires of change as happened in the end when Nigeria’s organized labor pulled out of the battle.

The Internet continues to shape our world relentlessly. In the age of the Internet, new paradigms become tired clichés in nanoseconds. Facebook is becoming the new Microsoft with energetic and more visionary upstarts yapping at her knees. For the writer and the reader, life is good. It is now possible to review an entire book on Twitter or Facebook and get even more of an audience than from a newspaper. So, I am on Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, the BlackBerry Messenger, etc. And I have this blog. I have a lot to tell you. I wrote a lot while worrying about the young warriors of January. I have a lot to tell you because I read lots of books (the book is dying by the way, but the book will outlive me and I intend to be around for another 100 years). There are other things on my mind that I would like to share. But first I have to type them into Cecelia my computer from the foolscap paper I wrote them in with my biro. And yes, I said this first on Twitter and Facebook: The two best books of fiction I read last year were Twitter and Facebook. They were witty, insightful and free. I heartily recommend them. Don’t go away. I am still here. Don’t go away.

Glad to see that you’re still around. I’ve been really interested following the Occupy Nigeria happenings as I’ve been able to online. So many great articles to get the points across which is helping ensure more people outside of the country also know what is going on.

Ah, thank you! January was a dream. Observing #OccupyNigeria from Ghana was a dream. It was unbelievable but it also felt right, natural and timely. The outcome, important though it was, fades in comparison to the process, the words that have entered the dialogue, the sense that we can take them on. Sometimes I dream that we’ve entered a new fight for this continent and that it is the right one. Looking forward to your thoughts.

That’s January and its memorable happenings o… Those leaders never expected what raging youths with the power of the New Media could do. We caught them pants down, their dirty yashes were blown by the e-wind. On many levels we won the war and that is not measurable by the new petrol pricing…

THANK GOD YOU ARE HERE & THANK YOU FOR PUTTING A SPIN, ON WHAT WE ACHIEVED WITH THE OCCUPY NIGERIA MOVEMEMENT. AT LEAST, THE FEEL GOOD FACTOR IS GREAT, ABOUT OUR ESCAPADE OF NEAR MISS WITH DESTINY, HOW WE NEARLY EFFECTED A NIGERIAN HARMATTAN, THOUGH THE NIGERIAN SPRING SOUNDS BETTER, IN THE END, I WILL STICK WITH THE OLD & NON ADVENTUROUS IKHIDE’S OCCASIONAL EXPOSITIONS, THROUGH THE WORLD OF THAT ARCHAIC ANACHRONISM……..BOOKS

I always love reading about what you have to say and how you express yourself. I am happy that I sent you my poetry book to review and that you were kind, helpful and encouraging but most of all constructive. Though it took me a few days to learn how to accept and appreciate what you were saying and that there were good qualities in what you were saying. I appreciate you more and more, the way you articulate yourself because there are so few people, so few writers/poets who can be as eloquent and prolific a writer as you can be. There were things that I wrote that you rejected and the first few minutes of course I hated you. I thought to be a good writer people have to sing your praises all the time but then I cheered up because you had a lot of good things to say too and you were sincere when you said them. This is just to say thank you for being you and for never being afraid to stand up to the life-force of society. i wish more writers could become aware of their self, what they are composed of and when you write you make it seem so easy.with that wonderful power you have. Although I am not commenting right now on what you have written above it always seems to render me speechless. We need more souls like you in this world.